[narrator]

What's funny is this is what Quark did in the 90s and then they got their market share stolen by Adobe. The same thing will happen to Adobe at some point. There will be so much user frustration that people will pack up and leave to the first reasonable tool that comes along.

[nwh]

The trouble is that the lock-in is immense. I know people with upwards of 20,000 PSD files in stock ready for when clients return and want similar jobs done. Every piece of print hardware I know of uses Pantone standard colours which no other software supports properly or fully. None of the plotters I have used support anything but Photoshop and Illustrator through Adobe Flash plugins. For all the cries that Sketch and Pixelmator replace Illustrator and Photoshop.. they just don't on the professional level.

Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.

[abalone]

You make a good point about high-end print production, but Sketch is definitely making inroads with professional designers. They don't have to worry about plotter compatibility.

[nwh]

When someone comes through the door and gives me anything but an illustrator file with the proper layers set up, they're going to get charged for someone to sit and weed them out of whatever format Sketch generates.

[keithpeter]

There was a printers close to where I'm typing this that would only accept Quark Xpress files for production.

That was fine for years. Now it is a car park.

[PhantomGremlin]

One would hope that you're correct. And in the very long run you will be. But IMO not anytime soon.

True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.

However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.

What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:

   Adobe is led by a bunch of dickheads who are
   alienating their customers. We think there's an
   opportunity for a more enlightened competitor
   to take market share.

Nobody will fund that. Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads. And then what happens to the startup's business plan?

Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!

[SoftwareMaven]

This is a classic innovator's dilemma. The competitor won't compete evenly with Adobe, they will start with an under served market. Adobe will scoff at them even being a threat. Sure, Adobe could stop being pricks any time, but that won't maximize profits, so they won't. Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.

And it may not be one company. It may be one for image editing, one for illustration, one for graphic design, and so on. There are really good tools out there today, but "everybody uses Adobe" so everybody uses adobe. Every one of these events (especially when Adobe costs your company money but refuses to provide any kind of remuneration) is one step closer to people saying "I'm going to learn something else".

[nova]

> Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.

To prevent that is what patents are for.

[peterkelly]

> Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads

That's a big assumption there

[aeberbach]

If you're one of those, I highly recommend Pixelmator - download at pixelmator.com. My choice for a really simple, easy image editor is Acorn from Flying Meat Software - http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/.

It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.

Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.

[ghshephard]

Love pixelmator - use it every single day and would never, ever consider using Photoshop for the types of image manipulation/touch up that I do.

Photoshop is really for the professional image editor - I can't believe that the average consumer really can't get by with pixelmator/acorn.

[andrewjkerr]

I love Pixelmator! It was on sale for $15 when I picked it up and I haven't regretted it. There's a slight learning curve from Photoshop, but it's definitely cheaper which is a huge plus.

[crag]

I second this: Pixelmator is great. But most heavy Photoshop users won't leave Photoshop unless dragged away. It's all they know. Sure they'll kick, scream, bitch. But suggest something like Pixelmator you get excuses like "But Pixelmator doesn't have [insert obscure filter that they've only used once in their life]".

In the end, they'll still stay on Adobe's CC.

[coldtea]

Actually Pixelmater doesn't have tons of NON obscure features, professionals (and image editing enthusiasts) use day in, day out.

We don't just crop, resize and apply some blur.

[rimantas]

You could not be more wrong with your assesment why Photoshop users stay with Photoshop. I bought Pixelmator, and I also got CC licencse. I don't even remember when was the last time I had Pixelmator open. Pixelmator is a great and cheap alternative if you indeed only need pretty basic things, but many need a lot more. And if you are in print business there is no discussion at all.

[thenomad]

The immediate thing that this particular sophisticated user misses is the ability to not have to buy a Mac to run it :)

Looks like great software, but there's no Windows version I can see.

[shravan]

On the topic of reasonable alternative tools, Sketch[1] has started to gain a tremendous amount of traction within a short amount of time within the web design community.

[1]: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch

[ary]

As a Sketch user myself I still recognize downside for some is that it isn't cross platform. There are still a lot of people that have to use creative tools on Windows for one reason or another. Data exchange is also a big deal. Sketch does make an excellent alternative to Illustrator for my purposes.

I'd argue that alternatives to Photoshop and After Effects are the killer apps needed for getting most people out of Adobe's ecosystem. The OS X specific alternatives for Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator, etc) just aren't quite there yet. I really, really want them to be though because I've held off on upgrading from CS4 for about as long as I can.

[thenomad]

There's already an excellent alternative to After Effects - Nuke.

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke-product-family/nuk...

Unfortunately, it's a wee bit more expensive. But I wonder if we'll see a price drop soon...

[oneeyedpigeon]

Undortunately, in my experience, this simply will not happen. Most designers I've worked with are wedded to Adobe so tightly that they won't even conceive of an alternative, and are utterly lost without it. Unfortunately, that perpetuates the monopoly, extortionate pricing, and allows poor service such as in this case.

[lpsz]

Wasn't a fan of the CC move. After using Photoshop for 10+ years I've switched to using Sketch for UX design and haven't needed to look back yet.

[yuhong]

I like to mention this: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=24116953#p24116...